Author
Topic: Core Requirements... (Read 2245 times)

I'm thinking of setting this up in my house, and the potential looks awesome. My main question is what are the requirements for the core? Do you need P4 power or can you get by with something like a quad P3 xeon server with 2-4GB ram? I ask this because I can find a quad P3 on ebay for $200-$500 pretty easily.. and obviously the P4 multicore option will run in the $1000s.

Also, as a side question, what then would be the minimum required hardware for a media director?

hmmm.. nobody has any input on this? basically what i need to know is this: what does the core do if it's not also used as a media director? does it do any processing of videos (conversion..etc), running the MDs, etc.. or does it just serve the files to the MDs on the network requiring only enough power to make sure that disk read/write speeds are fast enough to keep up?

basically i want to know if a quad P3 xeon 700 or 900mhz server with 2-4GB ram and a nice RAID could keep up if it was only used as a core, if i had faster (P4 or better) nodes for the MDs.

The true answer is that nobody knows exactly how well you proposed specs would run. I personally run a test machine consisting of a P4 and a half gig RAM. I can diskless boot 2 other machines and have them play movies with no jitter. If Kubuntu can recognize everything your server has, you should be good to go otherwise.

hmmm.. nobody has any input on this? basically what i need to know is this: what does the core do if it's not also used as a media director? does it do any processing of videos (conversion..etc), running the MDs, etc.. or does it just serve the files to the MDs on the network requiring only enough power to make sure that disk read/write speeds are fast enough to keep up?

basically i want to know if a quad P3 xeon 700 or 900mhz server with 2-4GB ram and a nice RAID could keep up if it was only used as a core, if i had faster (P4 or better) nodes for the MDs.

Hi,

Well our Cores are typically i945 motherboards with 3.0Ghz Celeron's and 512mb of RAM and ours are configures as hybrids so they also perform as MD's too. Our Hybrid cores can reliably support 3-4 pxe booted MD's in this config. That at least gives you some metrics to base a decision on.

Well our Cores are typically i945 motherboards with 3.0Ghz Celeron's and 512mb of RAM and ours are configures as hybrids so they also perform as MD's too. Our Hybrid cores can reliably support 3-4 pxe booted MD's in this config. That at least gives you some metrics to base a decision on.

Hope this helps

Andrew

Andrew,

That actually gives me a pretty good idea.. I'm sure that a 4x900mhz p3 with loads of ram can probably handle the load of at least 3-4 pxe boots. regardless, it's not like i couldn't find a use for a machine like that if it didn't work.

Now, I guess the only question left is how important are the specs for the MD?.. or can they be basically barebones aside from the sound and video cards?

From the MythTV perspective, it depends. The video cards will do some video processing, but for the best "quality and options" you probably need a bit of a beefy CPU. The previously recommended minimum was a "P4 3.0 Ghz; 512MB RAM" which has been easily translated to an AMD64 3200 or a Core2Duo at about ~1.8Ghz (such as a Mac Mini). These are HDTV specs, SDTV specs are considerably lower, but I don't think the lowend threshold has really been identified (lately) as hardware with these specs has become increasingly available at lower costs.

Well our Cores are typically i945 motherboards with 3.0Ghz Celeron's and 512mb of RAM and ours are configures as hybrids so they also perform as MD's too. Our Hybrid cores can reliably support 3-4 pxe booted MD's in this config. That at least gives you some metrics to base a decision on.

Hope this helps

Andrew

Andrew,

That actually gives me a pretty good idea.. I'm sure that a 4x900mhz p3 with loads of ram can probably handle the load of at least 3-4 pxe boots. regardless, it's not like i couldn't find a use for a machine like that if it didn't work.

Now, I guess the only question left is how important are the specs for the MD?.. or can they be basically barebones aside from the sound and video cards?

Thanks,

Dan

Hi Again Dan,

Well at the MD end of the system it comes down to what you need the MD to actually do. We have i915 based MD's with and without on-board optical drives but without HD's. These have typically again 512mb of ram and are usually low end Celeron-M powered to reduce heat and cooling noise. We also are testing several Via based fanless motherboards using CN700 graphics chip and the C7 processor. The Via's using the Openchrome driver make great MD's as they run silent (no fan), are low heat/energy, have excellent graphics power for video playback and also good IO options.

The other product that is worth checking out (we have not tested this product yet) is the FiireStation from www.fiire.com as these guys are Linuxmce specialists and the FireStation comes with special Via Bianry drivers to really get the most our of the Via chipset. Again I have not tested these units but I have it on good authority that these are likely to be nice products and have been designed for Pluto/linuxmce from the outset. However they are not cheap!